Rebecca MacKinnon's postings about work, reading, and ideas from 2004-2011.

December 01, 2008

Jeffrey Rosen has a great article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend titled Google's Gatekeepers. In it he deals with the question of whether we are becoming too overly dependent on a few big web companies like Google - and whether it's wise over the long run for us to trust their team of (currently) very nice, well-meaning people who are trying hard to do the right thing when faced with government censorship demands and surveillance pressures. He writes:

Today the Web might seem like a free-speech panacea: it has given anyone with Internet access the potential to reach a global audience. But though technology enthusiasts often celebrate the raucous explosion of Web speech, there is less focus on how the Internet is actually regulated, and by whom. As more and more speech migrates online, to blogs and social-networking sites and the like, the ultimate power to decide who has an opportunity to be heard, and what we may say, lies increasingly with Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and even eBay.

He quotes Columbia Law professor Tim Wu who says: "To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king...One reason they’re good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it’s over for them.”

It’s like if I was to concede that a benevolent dictatorship is a far more effective model for a political system than a liberal democracy. The problems you hit in that context is when the dictatorship slides from benevolence (or effectiveness), or you need a new dictator in a hurry. I love having Steve Jobs at Apple: I just can’t quite believe the odds that the next Steve Jobs will be at Apple too, and the one after that. I want to move my data seamlessly where the best ideas and implementation move.

One effort to place collective limits on the absolute power of the web giants, and to create a framework for greater transparency and accountability, is the Global Network Initiative, with which both Danny and I have been involved. But the GNI is just one step. Danny also advocates a more grassroots solution if people want the same independence online as they have in the physical world (or at least in democracies):

If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as we've come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC3 that can live with us on the edge, not be run by third parties.

I've been writing, speaking and attempting to think about these issues as well, in particular, what are the implications when you go beyond the democracies of North America and Western Europe? What are the concrete implications in the Middle East? In China? At the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Summit last month, I tried to provoke my web industry audience to rethink common American assumptions that the internet plus capitalism will inevitably equal democracy, without too much need to worry about the details. Here's the video of my talk, with slides overlaid:

Isaac Mao came right after me, talking about his idea of "sharism." Unfortunately he was asked to shorten his talk because the conference was running behind schedule and Al Gore had to catch a flight:

How do we create viable grassroots, distributed alternatives to Google and Twitter so that if they get shut down, or turn evil, we're not left in the lurch - or in jail? At the iCommons Summit in Sapporo in August, I gave a longer version of the my O'Reilly talk, and called on the global free culture community to work together to make sure that there are enough grassroots, distributed, non-proprietary spaces for people to communicate and express themselves so that we won't be so dependent on the web's benevolent dictators.

The question I have not yet managed to answer is: how do we succeed in breaking our dependence on the benevolent dictators? Or how can we help at least some of our web and telecoms dictators evolve from being monarchies to something more accountable, transparent, and participatory? Figuring out the answer should, it seems to me, be a major priority of free speech activism in the 21st century, and thus a major priority for the foundations and governments who fund them.

January 26, 2008

Congratulations to Charles Mok on the publication of his new book, Hong Kong 2.0! He had a well-attended launch event on Thursday, at which he asked me to say a few words.

Charles, who has become a good friend and ally over the past year, invited me to write a preface for the book. Since my written Chinese isn't up to the task I wrote it in English and he had it translated. Below is my original English draft.
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Many foreigners show up in Hong Kong and start drawing public conclusions about the place and its people within days of arrival. I can imagine that many Hong Kong people must be quite tired of such instant experts. Thus, as a recently arrived Westerner who speaks no Cantonese, I was surprised that Charles Mok invited me to write this preface. Yet he insisted, so I will try hard not to waste his readers' precious time.

Having spent altogether 12 years living in Beijing, when I moved to Hong Kong in January 2007 I brought with me many prejudices that Beijing people tend to hold about Hong Kong. According to these prejudices, Hong Kong people are allegedly not very creative, are culturally superficial, materialistic, are easily intimidated, and can be counted on to choose profit over principle.

Charles Mok is one of the many people I've met since moving to Hong Kong who have proven to me that such stereotypes are grossly unfair.

In my limited experience, the most inspiring and exciting people in Hong Kong are not the tycoons, the movie stars, or the celebrity politicians. Hong Kong has many talented individuals who do not dominate the newspaper headlines: entrepreneurs, independent writers and artists, local community leaders, and many others who are doing their own thing in their own way, staying true to their ideals and beliefs, trying to make difference for the people around them.

In Hong Kong version 1.0, it was the tycoons, pop stars, celebrity politicians and the media's favorite "pundits" who had most of the power and influence. In the 1.0 version of any country or territory, getting attention and having an impact was much more difficult without access to substantial investment capital, without contracts from recording or film studios, without access to a printing press or broadcasting channel, without somebody to publish and distribute your books, without journalists who agree to interview you and put your quotes in the newspaper or soundbites on television, and so forth.

Now Hong Kong and all of the world's modern cities are facing the 2.0 era. Successful transition from 1.0 to 2.0 will be key for maintaining Hong Kong's competitive edge in the global knowledge economy. In a global knowledge economy, competitiveness increasingly depends on a country or territory's ability to innovate: innovation not only in terms of business, products and services; but also innovation that creates the kind of working and living environment in which the world's top knowledge workers – and their families – can live happy and healthy lives.

As a cosmopolitan, multicultural city with one of the world's most highly educated populations, Hong Kong 2.0 has the potential to be one of the world's most vibrant and creative places. In Hong Kong 2.0, ideas and innovations in all fields would be able to emerge from the "bottom up" rather than from the "top down;" from the "edges" rather than from the "center" – after all, experience shows that the best business ideas and most exciting cultural innovations in the past few years have tended to come from the most unexpected places, and almost never from a government planner's desk.

This is great news if you do not belong to one of the categories of famous people listed above. Internet entrepreneurs are launching startups with small amounts of pooled savings. Independent artists, filmmakers and musicians are increasingly using mobile and internet technologies to get their works known. Bloggers and podcasters who put their creations directly on the Internet are gaining popularity among young people without having to first get a TV or radio show. Citizen media groups like InMedia have used the internet to organize social movements to preserve Hong Kong's historical heritage. Journalists can publish pointed political analysis directly on their blogs, whether or not their newspaper editors dare to publish it.

But as Charles Mok has pointed out in many of his essays over the past few years, it is not yet clear whether Hong Kong's legislative and regulatory structures will enable Hong Kong to evolve successfully from 1.0 to 2.0 and achieve its full potential. Is Hong Kong capable of truly taking advantage of all that its highly-educated, culturally diverse people have to offer? Or will the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region potentially squander its potential by sticking to a set of outdated 1.0 style regulatory structures and laws – a system which might favor the entrenched 1.0 interests, but which might also hold Hong Kong back while the world's most competitive cities boldly stride forward to 2.0 and beyond?

The good news is that there are more ways than ever for all of us as Hong Kong residents and citizens to make our views known – both to each other as well as to the people who currently hold power in Hong Kong. In his essays, Charles describes many of those ways, and discusses many of the policy reforms he believes are necessary in order for Hong Kong to transition successfully from 1.0 to 2.0. No doubt you will have other views – you may or may not agree with everything he says. But the point is that if you want the dream of Hong Kong 2.0 to be fulfilled, it's up to you to help make it happen. Don't sit and wait for 1.0 leaders to solve Hong Kong's problems in a top-down 1.0 fashion. We have only ourselves to blame if we sit around waiting for other people to build Hong Kong 2.0, and do nothing about it ourselves.

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Read on for the Chinese translation (use of the terms 老外 and 洋婦 were deliberate)..

January 24, 2008

For me, the two most thought-provoking sessions at the Workshop on Asia and Commons last weekend were a panel on Saturday afternoon called "Commons: Cultural Perspectives from Asia" and Sunday's final brainstorm discussion. The Creative Commons blog has a good summary of the entire conference, and somebody thankfully wikified the notes from the final brainstorm.

Here's the thing. Creative Commons has become a global movement, with the licenses localized all over the world. But as an organization founded in the U.S., with its international arm based in Europe, the language and approach of "Commons" tends to be heavily legalistic and discussed mainly from the standpoint of Western legal and philosophical frameworks. Many people attending the meeting in Taipei wondered whether Creative Commons in Asia is likely to be more successful as a social movement than as a set of copyright licenses (as Peter Yu has pointed out in the past). There was also a feeling that in order to be truly relevant to the globe, the CC movement's central message needs to undergo a shift that would incorporate more non-Western approaches to the idea of "commons," content creation, and sharing.

Historian Jo-shui Chen was invited to comment on the idea of "commons" in the Chinse cultural context. How should we frame our discussion of "commons" in a predominantly Chinese society in order to increase the chances that Creative Commons will be accepted? Prof. Chen has researched the Chinese concept of "gong" which he describes as "the Chinese notion closest to the Western idea of 'public'." In his abstract he writes:

“Gong” is not a single idea; it is rather a complex of ideas with a history of almost three thousand years. Two fundamental meanings of “Gong” are “government” and “general” or “universal” with the implication of equality. A less prominent meaning of “gong,” which is quite late in origins, is “common” or “shared”.

Chen believes that both "gong" and "si" (meaning "private") are "more about state of mind than separation of spheres," which makes it easier for a person to be both at once in ways that would be confusing or contradictory to Westerners. Also, culturally, he said that "it is difficult for most Chinese to associate themselves with public affairs because they are considered the business of government." He argues that the idea of "public domain" as Westerners would view it is not consistent with traditional Chinese ways of thinking - and that it would be viewed more as a "wilderness" with no inherent order, while at the same time people have a "strong sense of entitlement to resources in this wilderness." He finds that in traditional Chinese social-political consciousness, people perceive public order is as the domain of government. Social activities are organized by gentry, but there is no general idea of public order which is not directly under the control of government.

Given this cultural context, Chen argues that the best way to articulate Creative Commons in Chinese communities is as a kind of public order: "a kinder gentler public order that is good for all...not based upon absolute individual rights, but rather a system that seeks to promote public order and public interest." He concludes that unless CC is framed in this way, "many people with resort to traditional thinking and view the internet as free for all." He also points out that "Individual rights may have been enshrined in law under Western influence, but this idea is very far away from people's real life."

Lawrence Liang, a lawyer of Chinese descent from Bangalore, gave a brilliant talk (I'm told all his talks are brilliant - this was the first time I've heard him speak) titled "How Does An Asian Commons Mean." No, that's not a typo. He points out that "the metaphor of the commons as it is used in debates on information emerges from a specific history of the enclosures movement in Europe." The task of articulating an Asian Commons requires more than merely translating existing initiatives such as Creative Commons, but rather "to answer larger questions of what it means to provide an epistemological account of the commons in Asia." This is especially challenging because the idea that one can consider oneself "Asian" and that such a label has real cultural or social meaning "is a "diplomatic fiction... neither Asia nor commons has any substantive content."

Liang rightly points out that if the "Asian Commons" is merely viewed as a geographical extension of the existing Creative Commons movement, then it has no meaningful role to play because it is pretty much content-free: it merely describes a diverse range of people who happen to be labeled "Asian." The idea of "Asian Commons" only has meaning if it has a substantive global impact on the "idea of the commons." He believes that in discussing Asian perspectives on the commons, we have valuable "opportunities to remove beyond romantic ideals of the commons...move beyond the binary of the debate."

The idea of Asia, Liang also points out, "has often been described in terms or a lack, or a derivative, or of a copy, mimicry... the idea that Asian countries are pirate nations... recycled modern." It's time to move away from this framing.

Furthermore, just as maps don't represent human realities, he argues, nor do legal licenses. "There is a problem with fetishization of licenses" in the Creative Commons movement, he believes. He points to the traditional Indian concept of generosity, which does not involve contracts and precise definitions of property ownership and challenges us to go beyond Western legalistic approaches to consider how the Creative Commons movement can best serve its ultimate goals: maximizing social creativity and learning for the sake of the greater good.

During Sunday's discussion, Isaac Mao raised his idea of "sharism" as a framework for promoting the goals of Creative Commons that is more likely to gain widespread acceptance in Asia, in contrast to Lessig-esque terrms like "free culture." The problem, as Liang pointed out, is that the words "free" and "freedom" have been irreparably polluted by American geopolitics and tainted by perceived agendas of regime change, making anything labeled with those words a hard sell in the developing world. Riffing off the expression "free as in beer," he remarked: "free as in America is unhelpful." There was a widespread sense among people in the room that an emphasis on "public good" and "sharing" will enable the movement to have a much deeper impact, ultimately.

Another thread that came out of the final discussion was that Creative Commons - especially when one emphasizes the movement - provides an opportunity for people in this region to develop and assert alternatives to the copyright regime that the U.S. seeks to jam down everybody's throats. Rather than apologize for being "pirates," and accept the U.S. trade negotiator's premise of "Asia as lacking," why not work to build a model that promotes innovation and shared learning in new, forward-looking ways that will help Asian societies come out ahead in the global knowledge economy?

Weve built the number two, number three infrastructure in the world over the last ten years. So what are we going to do with it? Now, if we're going to have a not very forward-looking copyright regime that binds us, shackles us, it's quite clear that the creative community in Hong Kong - music, film, the arts - their ability to mix, mash, be creative is somehow not factored in to the current view of the law. So all we're trying to do is say, look. It's not necessarily "all rights reserved," it's also "some rights reserved." Lets try and use the existing copyright regime and make licensing - look at the licensing aspect. Not everyone by nature wants to fall foul of copyright law, but give us some options. It's not that we don't want to obey the law, its that we do want to have a license, but make it easier for us to get a license. Furthermore, give us some choices as far as the types of license we can get. Therefore Creative Commons has been around, weve looked at it we all know it. Many of us who are involved in the industry worldwide have said "hey look its quite strange we don't have Creative Commons in Hong Kong." Why not? Why don't we go and do it? So that's what we've done."

...Hong Kong is one of the freest economies in the world. So let the market decide. The Creative Commons license should be there by default. Once it's there then we can start doing things that are very interesting... This is a starting point not an ending point.

JOI:

...The problem is that the mass production and delivery of content is the main model that people want to use the internet for, but then you might as well use cable. That's fine for broadcast thats not a bad architecture... but the internet is really for peer to peer communication. And the problem is that if you don't create a legal regime that allows you to do it, people will do it anyway but it will be illegal. And so by causing people to do illegal things, its also one of these thing where people figure well, if I'm breaking the law anyway.. I might as well go all the way. So the minute you make people into pirates, you call them criminals and terrorists like they did in the United States, then theyre going to come back at you, they're going to attack you, they're going to treat you like the man. So what Creative Commons is trying to do is get everybody to the table, get everybody to follow the rule of law, respect each other's needs, and say everyone has the right to have a choice.

...What you're fighting for right now is the attention of a person.

...Whats really a pity is that this Hollywood regime is infecting other governments into thinking that by having a strong copyright regime they will encourage the content business. When in fact by encouraging the amateur business they may sell more video cameras and televisions and network connections and bandwith, and we would probably make a lot more money supporting the sharing economy in asia than we would trying to build a hollywood inside Hong Kong.

There are quite a lot of tech startups around the region using open source software and/or Creative Commons licensing, a few of whom are here at the conference. Ellis Wang showed us his EeePC, pictured on the right, a subnotebook computer running on a Linux-based operating system (WSJ has a review of it here). Sean Moss-Pultz discussed OpenMoko, which he describes as the world's first "totally open phone." (Recently Gizmodo wondered whether the iPhone developers borrowed some of their ideas.) We also heard from Takeshi Homma from Sony, who runs eyeVio, a kind of youtube-like video sharing service which uses Creative Commons licenses for user-generated content (see an English-language article about it here).

On Friday night we heard from some independent artists, photographers, and filmmakers who are licensing their works under creative commons and finding it a useful way to get their works seen and known. We'll get a concert later tonight featuring musicians who use CC for at least some of their work.
I will continue posting photos to my Flickr account.

The opening keynote was by Terry Fisher of Harvard's Berkman Center, who discussed his proposed solution to the world's copyright problems, which involves his new company, Noank Media. The company is mainly working in Canada and China right now. More info on how it works here. In China they're working with a company called Felio run by CERNET (the China Education and Research Network), to deploy a legal file-sharing service in Chinese universities. The idea is to act as a broker between producers of creative content and people who want to consume it, compensating producers according to how many people are using their works. I asked Terry how Noank is going to deal with user privacy issues as well as government censorship requirements in China. Regarding privacy, he said "there is no one participant" along the chain of distribution, service providing, and downloading "who simultaneously knows what has been consumed and who has consumed it." Which should protect users from dossiers being kept on them about what films or movies they're watching and listening to. When it comes to censorship, he said that so far they haven't encountered any problems because for now they've only been dealing with music and that censorship questions have not come up. He said he wasn't sure how they will deal with censorship requests if they receive them in the future. But he also said that based on his interactions with Chinese officials, he thinks that there is probably more acceptance in the Chinese government apparatus about the inevitability of open flows of information than one would assume based on current censorship behavior and policy. I'll be following up on that thought in my brief talk tomorrow morning.

While many people and businesses will always choose to protect their works under traditional "all rights reserved" copyright, many people here in the community are eager to share their creative and intellectual works more broadly in a way that the Creative Commons "some rights reserved" licenses make possible.

Thanks to the hard work of Professors Yahong Li and Alice Lee at the University of Hong Kong law faculty, we now have a draft of the Creative Commons license converted into language that will hopefully hold up under Hong Kong IP law. It has been posted here on the Creative Commons website. We are seeking feedback from the community - particularly from those who understand Hong Kong IP law. If you have questions, criticisms, or comments, please click on the "post a message" link and join the discussion.

As I've mentioned in the past, Hong Kong is behind Mainland China and Taiwan when it comes to Creative Commons and the free culture movement. We're hoping to catch up. I'm pretty optimistic that we will, given that we've got some awesome people committed to the project. One in particular is Ben Cheng who works with me at Hong Kong U. An open source programmer, wikipedian, and dedicated free culture advocate with strong community connections, his work so far has been critical in keeping things going.

In Mainland China, where CC-China Mainland officially launched last year, some scholars are hoping to use CC and the free culture movement as a way to help empower underprivileged groups. Prof. Wang Jing of MIT recently wrote a paper about some of those projects, which can be downloaded here (PDF). My good friend Isaac Mao is also one of the people who first brought the Creative Commons movement to the mainland Chinese web community several years ago.

The Taiwan CC folks are organizing a great meeting for next weekend in Taipei called the International Workshop on Asia and Commons in the Information Age. I'll be giving a talk on Sunday about why free speech needs free culture. I'm looking forward to learning a lot from the other presenters about what's happening around the region, and how our group in Hong Kong can collaborate with people around Asia to promote free culture.

December 16, 2007

Hong Kong's web community is full of some really fabulous, energetic people. The first ever Barcamp Hong Kong on Saturday left no doubt about that! Ryanne (the photo above is from her camera) sums it up:

i found myself surrounded by people in firefox, linux and all kinds of web 2.0 shirts; people handing out moo cards, showing off their flickr/cc stickers, giving interactive sessions on ajax, facebook, open social, desktop apps, digital printing, web service scalability...whatever you can think of. free coffee, cookies, chips and sandwiches were provided. it's surprising to see so many talented and generous people in HK who came here to share their love. or just to learn...like why i was there.

It seems to me that almost 40% were developers, 30% were from business organizations (project manager, start up owner), 10% were from NGOs and 20% were unknown (maybe bloggers just like me?). This is just my wide guess, I am sure that someone could give me a better answer.

In terms of nationality, 70% were HongKongers and 30% were Foreigner. However there must be Singaporean because I heard the accent. Language used during the presentations were English while I heard that offline discussions were mostly in Cantonese.

In keeping with the global Barcamp tradition, Saturday's meeting was run as an "unconference": No pre-organized panels or keynotes or invited lectures. First thing in the morning, participants are greeted by a whiteboard indicating timeslots and rooms. Anybody who wants to lead a discussion or give an impromptu presentation writes their subject on a post-it note and sticks it on the board. Similar topics are combined and consolidated, then away we go. With the mix of people we had, the result was a really nice mix of technical sessions, sessions about business, and more philosophical discussions.

I learned a lot from many people about the web startup scene in Hong Kong, the mobile web, online communities, search engine optimization, and many other things. But like most conferences the most important part was getting to know a great group of people, sitting around talking in the halls and sharing all kinds of ideas.

Since the meeting was hosted by Yahoo! Hong Kong, I felt compelled to lead a discussion on "user rights," the lessons all of us should learn from the Shi Tao case, and how should the web community constructively proceed if we care about protecting users' rights to privacy and free expression? (For the record the local Yahoo! folk were good sports about it.) It was exciting to see how many people came to the session and showed that they care about building responsible web businesses. There was an especially thought provoking discussion about where to host user data. One person said you should just host all user data in the U.S. so that governments like the Chinese government can't get at it. Others questioned whether this is a cop out for local businesses especially: shouldn't local companies push to maintain and defend spaces where the rights of users can be protected in their home jurisdictions? Don't they owe that to their users? There was also the question of whether users from here or anywhere else can really count on the U.S. government in the long run anyway - or any government for that matter if nobody is pushing back. Several people who work in web startups said they would really like to see common guidelines developed for the industry about how to deal with governments that pressure them to control user speech or make unreasonable user data demands. We also raised the need to do a better job at informing the public about how e-mail and user content-sharing services work, and with whom their data is shared. Several people said they hope to see more discussions like this in the Hong Kong web community. In response to that interest, I set up a follow-on wiki page here where you can find out more and sign up on a "Hong Kong user rights" google group.

Interested in getting involved with Hong Kong's next Barcamp, or in learning more about what happened on Saturday? Check out the BarCamp HongKong wiki page and Facebook Group.

Also, for anybody who may be interested, I'll be presenting a paper titled "Yahoo!, Shi Tao, and the Lessons for Corporate Social Responsibility" on Tuesday at the International Conference on Technology and Social Responsibility being held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I will put the paper online when it's ready for public viewing.

August 05, 2007

Joi Ito was the first blogger I ever met - at least knowingly. He is also one of several people who inspired me to leave TV journalism and get involved with the web, free culture, and online citizen media.

Joi's keynote speech on the final day of Wikimania was not about wikis or Wikipedia specifically - but about the core set of beliefs underpinning this community: free culture and what Joi calls the "sharing economy."

Joi (who has been reading the Dalai Lama recently) points out that there is a difference between "happiness" and "pleasure." Pleasure can be obtained with money. Happiness cannot be.

"We make decisions every day without thinking about the difference between pleasure and happiness," he says. "We need to think about this more."

He's right. People who work on any of the Wikimedia projects are certainly not motivated by money: Nobody who creates any of the content gets paid a cent. (The funds raised are spent on computer server space, administrative and technical staff needed to keep things running, legal counsel, etc.) The Wikipedians I've been hanging out with over the past several days derive happiness and feelings of self-worth and belonging by being active participants in a global community. People gain lasting and deep friendships - and sometimes even fall in love - while spending hours every week working to build a free body of knowledge online.

Journalists and other media professionals I know tend to be perplexed as to why people would spend so much time writing and editing articles for free. A friend who works for a major web company recently expressed shock that the Wikipedians hold their conference over a weekend when they could be home with their families. Of course since most Wikipedians have other jobs, weekends are the only time many can make a conference. But more importantly, the people attending Wikimania are here because it contributes to their happiness.

Joi spent a lot of his talk discussing Creative Commons (click here and here for more about CC as an alternative form of copyright that encourages sharing). Beyond the legal issues of intellectual property law, Joi's larger point is that people will be happier, more innovative (which is good economically in the long run) and more free if we focus less on the money we think we will make from our creations in the short term, and more on how our work will contribute to well being and happiness of others.